seeing | Michael Valliant

Faith and Gratitude

Lead in: I am in my second year in seminary through the Iona Eastern Shore program, which allows our cohort to continue working while we are in seminary. October 8-9 was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. This is the text of the sermon I gave.

Churches/denominations that use the Revised Common Lectionary have prescribed readings for each day and Gospel readings for each Sunday. So we don’t get to pick what Gospel we preach on.

The Gospel reading for October 9 was Luke 17:11-19, where Jesus heals 10 men with a skin disease and only one, a foreigner, comes back in praise and gratitude.

“Faith and Gratitude”

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem. Over the past few weeks, we have seen him talking to and teaching his disciples. But today there is a bit of shift.

He’s approached by 10 lepers. What do we know about lepers during this time?

They kept distant from non-lepers.
They formed their own colonies.
They positioned themselves near trafficways so that they could make appeals for charity.
To be let back into society they had to be checked out by a priest, in a kind of certification process.
Leprosy was estrangement from both God and other people. It had a stigma.

When writing his novel, “The Name of the Rose,” Umberto Eco put it like this: “In saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the city.’”

They were the fringe of the fringe.

The lepers are keeping their distance and following protocol and they call out to Jesus. And he SEES them. Seeing is important here.

He tells them to go and show themselves to the priests, which is how they would be able to get back into everyday life, to no longer be outcast or untouchable.

And “as they went,” they were made clean. Their healing was connected to their obedience—they did what Jesus told them to do.

One of the lepers, a foreigner, a Samaritan, SAW that he was healed, and his response was to turn back, praise God with a loud voice, and to lie on the ground in front of Jesus and thank him.

It’s notable that the leper doesn’t just thank Jesus as some great healer on the street, he knows the healing has come from God and he praises God before he thanks Jesus.

Jesus SAW the lepers and the one Samaritan leper saw that God had healed him through Jesus. And he was grateful.

We see a lot of healing stories in the Gospels, but in this case, the story Luke tells is less about the healing and more about the response of the one leper.

The three questions Jesus then asks are not really addressed to the grateful Samaritan but they underscore the point of the story:

Were not 10 made clean?
Where are they?
Were none of them found to return and give praise except this foreigner?

Why the Foreigner?

This is not a knock on the nine who did what they were instructed. They followed orders. They were healed. We don’t know what happened to them after—they may have gone on to spread their own stories and good news for the rest of their lives.

But the foreigner, the stranger was different. Why is that? What was it that made him turn around while the others went on their way?

I like a thought that Fred Craddock shared in his book, “Interpretations: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching—Luke.” In thinking through the stranger in our time, he said:

“It is often the stranger in the church who sings heartily the hymns we have long left to the choir, who expresses gratitude for blessings we had not noticed, who listens attentively to the sermon we think we have already heard, who gets excited about our old Bible, and who becomes actively involved in acts of service to which we send small donations. Must it always be so?”
Fred Craddock

I wonder, do I get complacent? Do we sometimes go about our business doing what was asked of us, but not stopping to give thanks and praise for both remarkable and everyday things that bring us joy? Or those things that connect us to God and to each other?

Reading Scripture: WWJD?

Studying Scripture has so many layers to it, any of which can give us pause, can make us think, can stop us and meet us where we are.

We need to understand the context in which something was written; we need to think about the audience the writer, in this case Luke, was writing for; and we have both God’s Word in the Bible and any number of great commentaries that have been written to help us understand it.

And then we also want to figure out the relevance of something for our lives. What do we do with what we read? Why does it matter? What is the “so what?” of ten lepers getting healed more than 2,000 years ago? Why should we care?

Fr. Bill Ortt often says to think about Scripture as a prism, where you can turn it around to see different facets of it. And if we do that in this story, we’ve got the grateful leper, we’ve got the other nine who were healed, and we’ve got Jesus. We may have a tendency not to put ourselves in Jesus’s place in the story, because, well, he’s Jesus and we’re not.

But these stories are shared for us to learn from. For us to ponder, to take in. And who is the main character in the New Testament who we want to learn about? Jesus.

And why? Maybe to be more like him. What’s the bumper sticker—what’s the saying that is used over and over again: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?

And how do you know, how can you consider what Jesus would do if you don’t read Scripture to get to know him better?

So in this story, what does Jesus do?

Seeing and Doing

First, Jesus sees the lepers who call out to him. Really sees them and what their problem is. And what he sees is human beings, not lepers. Luke illustrates this point over and over again in his Gospel:

When we meet the demoniac at Gerasene, Luke calls him, “a man from the city who had demons.”
Here, Luke doesn’t say 10 lepers, he says, “10 men with a skin disease.”

In writing his Gospel, Luke doesn’t define people by their afflictions, by their diseases, by what’s wrong with them. Because Jesus doesn’t define people that way. Jesus sees our humanity. And he sees the humanity of these 10 men.

And what does he do once he sees? He acts, he steps in to help, to heal.

If we want to model our lives after Jesus, where does that leave us?

We need to see. Do we take the time to see what is going on around us? We can look nationally and globally—the devastating damage in Florida from Hurricane Ian; the ongoing war in Ukraine; insert your news of struggle and suffering going on in the world.

We can also look closer to home: our family, our friends, our neighbors, and people in our community. We’ve got a lot of people barely holding on around us. Do we see them?

Then, what do we do when we see them? Do we reach out? Do we pray for people? Do we come alongside them when we can and walk with someone who is having a hard time.

Do we do…what we see Jesus doing time and time again in Scripture, and especially in Luke’s Gospel, and in today’s story? See, help, heal.

What do we see?
Do we see the needs, the struggles of others?
And what do we do?

Let’s take some pressure off of ourselves for a minute. Living like Jesus is certainly the goal, but wow, is that tough. Sometimes getting out of bed in the morning and getting through the day without telling someone off seems more attainable.

Gratitude

Let’s look more closely at the Samaritan who was healed and who came back. Let’s walk in his footsteps.

Back to seeing: what does the Samaritan see? He sees that he has been healed. He recognizes that God was at work. And he praises, he humbles himself, and he gives thanks.

We can do that, right? There are times when being grateful is everything. That’s a big part of my story and what has me standing here in front of you.

I caught up with a childhood friend who I haven’t seen in decades. We grew up playing little league baseball together in Oxford and he went on to fly F-16s in the Air Force for 20 years. We had lunch last week and what we both wanted to talk about was faith and spiritual awakenings. And he asked what prompted this calling in me.

My one-word answer was, and is, gratitude.

A little more than seven years ago my younger daughter had a bad seizure caused by brain swelling. She was visiting family outside Pittsburgh and she had to be intubated and flown by helicopter to Children’s Hospital, where she was in pediatric intensive care for 10 days and in the hospital for the next month.

Faith wasn’t a big part of my life then, but as I sat with her in the hospital, as I listened to doctors, as we tried to figure out what was next, people continually reached out to say they were praying and ask how they could help.

And what I could feel, could palpably feel, was a community of prayers changing me. I wouldn’t say I started out where the Grinch was, but my heart grew in significant ways that I am still trying to wrap my head around. And I felt a peace and calm in the midst of so much worry.

When we came home, I was full of capital “G” Gratitude. I didn’t necessarily know where to put it or what to do with it, but a friend invited me to church. That sounded like a good start. And that was the first step on a path that led here, and with gratitude every day it is a walk that is still going.

I saw healing. I felt a change, a kind of healing in me. And giving praise and thanks is my response.

Salvation

Let’s turn our attention back to the grateful leper. Jesus says to him, “Your faith has made you well.” Fred Craddock who I quoted earlier points out that the verb that was used for “made well” is the same word that is often translated, “to be saved.”

Jesus healed 10 people, but only one, the one who came back and was grateful, received something much bigger than physical healing. His faith, as expressed by his gratitude, saved him.

Alan Culpepper in “The New Interpreter’s Bible,” looks at this and says that the story challenges us to regard gratitude as an expression of faith.

That resonates with me. Gratitude feels like a way to express our faith.

Culpepper says further: “If gratitude reveals humility of spirit and a sensitivity to the grace of God in one’s life, then is there any better measure of faith than wonder and thankfulness before what one perceives as unmerited expressions of love and kindness from God and from others?”

Living with a Grateful Heart

What does gratitude look like in our lives? What do we do when we have a grateful heart?

I have one more quick example. When I started working here at Christ Church they gave me the office at the top of the stairs in the Rectory. I end up talking to just about everyone who comes up and down the steps—which aren’t the easiest steps to navigate.

Well, a few times a week, Bruce Richards would come up the steps and go into the bathroom, and when he came out he would stop in and share this amazing smile, and energy, and joy and gratitude.

It turns out at the time that all the Stephen Ministry books, brochures and pins were kept in the bathroom closet, and he would go in to stock up on whatever he needed.

So I had a running joke with Bruce that he had a Clark Kent/Superman phone booth in the bathroom and he would come out as a superhero for pastoral care. Except it wasn’t a joke at all. That’s who Bruce was.

As the years went on, Bruce was slower getting up and down the steps, but his joy, his smile, and his gratitude didn’t change.

We commended Bruce to God on Saturday and I have so many pictures of him on my heart. Bruce carried printed out prayers in his wallet and in his calendar and he sometimes gave me one if he thought I looked like I needed it, or he would tell me to pass it on to someone who did.

Bruce came with us to give Communion to a parishioner in Oxford who had fallen and couldn’t make it to church for a while. For us, it was a special visit, but Bruce did this all the time, in nursing homes, people’s houses, you name it.

And I have a picture of Bruce coming to his door on his 80^th birthday, during the height of the pandemic, when a group of us went to sing happy birthday to him with Brenda Wood playing the accordion.

Bruce was a grateful heart personified. He showed us what it looked like to live with gratitude and for him it looked like caring for others, so much so, that he helped begin a new ministry at the church, specifically to care for people going through tough times… by listening to them, praying with them, and walking beside them. And Bruce’s work of 18 years here continues today with all the Stephen Ministers, the care givers and care receivers, who are grateful and helping us create a church community of compassion.

Bruce saw people hurting. He acted, he did something about it, using gifts that he didn’t know he had, always giving thanks with gratitude.

I wish we didn’t have to lose people like Bruce, people in our lives who show us what it is to live with a grateful heart—people we are grateful for. But it makes me even more thankful for the time that we had together and the example he still is for all of us. What a gift to know people like that and to be able to continue their work in love.

Alan Culpepper has a thought here that I’d like to close with, which gets us to the heart of today’s Gospel:

“Faith, like gratitude, is our response to the grace of God as we have experienced it. For those who have become aware of God’s grace, all of life is infused with a sense of gratitude, and each encounter becomes an opportunity to see and respond in the spirit of the grateful leper.”

Amen.

The Miracle of Being Here and Going Home

I think about the movie “Shawshank Redemption” a good bit. In one of the most quotable conversations of the film, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says to Red (Morgan Freeman):

“It comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”

And that might be the simplest breakdown, though likely too simple, of the last section of John O’Donohue’s “Anam Cara.” The section is called, “Death: The Horizon is the Well.”

Death has a lot to do with life. In our lives, negativity and fear exile us from our own love and warmth, O’Donohue says, and to live life fully we need to transfigure or transform the negativity and fear “by turning it toward the light of your soul.”

“Eventually what you call the negative side of yourself can become the greatest force for renewal, creativity, and growth within you.”

O’Donohue says that part of transforming this negativity and fear happens by us letting go of it.

“Mystics have always recognized that to come deeper into the divine presence within, you need to practice detachment. When you begin to let go, it is amazing how enriched your life becomes. False things, which you have desperately held on to, move away very quickly from you. Then what is real, what you love deeply, and what really belongs to you comes deeper into you.”

Like the subject of aging, which was the previous section in “Anam Cara,” we don’t like to think or talk about death. It is an absolute fact of life, but it’s not a place we are comfortable going in conversation. We see death as separate from life, an ending, a horizon that we head towards. O’Donohue points out that it doesn’t really work that way. He quotes Hans Georg Gadamer, who says:

“A horizon is something toward which we journey, but it is also something that journeys along with us.”

Death is something that is always with us, not just at the end. And there are ways that we can get to know it.

“The meeting with your own death in the daily forms of failure, pathos, negativity, fear, or destructiveness are actually opportunities to transfigure your ego. These are invitations to move out of that productive, controlling way of being toward an art of being that allows openness and hospitality.”

What we go through in life can help us live more deeply. When we risk something and fail or fall and learn and get back up and move on, we can learn to release our fear and anxiety about it. This is also true of death.

“When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging.”

Our life and our faith can help us to see death as a release into a completely new divine belonging. We can see examples of the natural life cycle, birth, life, death, rebirth–in the landscape, in nature, and all around us.

In our lives, we can see and feel and know that love goes on beyond death, love is bigger.

If we see death as going into nothingness, O’Donohue points out that “nothingness is the sister of possibility.” There needs to be space, nothingness, in order to create. In the creation story in Genesis, out of a formless void, God uses light and creates space for things to happen.

“Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected… This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities. It is also a sign that your soul longs to transfigure the nothingness of your death into the fullness of a life eternal, which no death can ever touch… Death is not the end; it is a rebirth.”

This is all heady stuff. We are dealing with something we have no first-hand experience of, it is not something we can know. But it’s something we come to know in terms of losing people we love. During the six weeks that our study was together, we had multiple people lose dear and close family members as well as bringing in home hospice care to care for a parent. Death is ever present and devastating when it claims those we love.

Some folks in our group found this chapter helpful, some felt it was a subject that was too close to process. The thing about a study like this, or a Bible study, or any small group of people who you meet with and are close to–I think Ram Dass put it beautifully in saying, “We are all walking each other home.” We need to be there for each other in the tender and tough times of loss and pain.

We get a chance to be there for one another. But as for those who have died, O’Donohue says, why grieve them?

“We do not need to grieve for the dead. Why should we grieve for them? They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came. They have returned to the nest of their identity within the great circle of God. God is the greatest circle of all, the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal, and eternal, as one.”

There is the good stuff. Those who have passed have gone home. They are contained in the circle of God. They have moved from our temporal world into the eternal.

And then O’Donohue does something cool. He talks about how he sees eternal time:

“In eternal time all is now; time is presence. I believe that is what eternal life means: it is a life where all that we seek–goodness, unity, beauty, truth, and love–are no longer distant from us but are now completely present with us.”

Completely present. Complete presence. There is something wonderful, whole, and beautiful to that. In the deepest sense, that is home.

What do we do with all that? How should that inform our lives? Well, if death is a release, a homecoming, a rebirth, then it isn’t something to be feared or ignored. Being at peace with what happens at the end of our lives, we should focus on how we live our lives.

We should transfigure the small deaths–the failures, the fears, the setbacks–and try to grow in presence with others in love, grace, hospitality. We should look for and try to experience eternal presence in our temporal lives (we go back to chronos and kairos again).

O’Donohue reminds us:

“It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here.”

If I think back to Shawshank Redemption, and “get busy living or get busy dying,” I can think of living as taking advantage of the miracle of being here. And I can think of get busy dying is forgetting that privilege, of allowing fear and negativity to control how we live, which would be not living to the fullest.

So Andy Dufresne may still be on to something.

We closed our last class this past Monday with part of a prayer from “A New Zealand Prayer Book,” in their Daily Devotions, excerpting from the Monday prayer. Since it is Monday as I write, we will close here with it as well:

From “A New Zealand Prayer Book”

From Monday Evening

There is nothing in death or life,
in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers,
in the world as it is or the world as it shall be,
in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths –
nothing in all creation
which can separate us from the love of God
which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Love never comes to an end.

Holy One, holy and eternal,
awesome, exciting and delightful in your holiness;
make us pure in heart to see you;
make us merciful to receive your kindness,
and to share our love with all your human family;
then will your name be hallowed on earth as in heaven.

Support us, Lord, all the day long,
until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes,
the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over,
and our work done;
then Lord, in your mercy, give us safe lodging,
a holy rest and peace at the last.

Amen.

The Tree Which Moves Us

William Blake’s writing and artwork inspired my first tattoo, 21 years ago. This morning he reminded me to see God in all things. And it turns out today (Nov. 28) is also Blake’s birthday.

Reading him in a British romanticism class at Washington College changed the way I thought about writing. This morning, drinking coffee and reading, a letter Blake wrote to a patron-turned-critic popped up:

“I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eye of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

I didn’t set out to read Blake this morning, the letter was in a chapter of Eknath Easwaran’s commentary on the Beatitudes. I came across the same letter again, referenced by Maria Popova’s Brainpickings, pointing out his birthday. I like it when God makes it obvious that you are supposed to read and think about something today.

Walking around Tuckahoe State Park on Sunday, I kept taking pictures because the sun was setting and bouncing light beautifully off the trees and the water. We live in a place where we can be frequently reminded to stop and look at amazing things. If we make time. It’s all around us: yellow ginkgo leaves covering the ground, Great Blue Herons in flight, seldom seen birds at the feeder outside the window.

Blake’s point is that we don’t all look at things the same way. For someone looking to clear land and build a house, or someone who is late to work, a tree might be just something in the way or background scenery. For others, it can be the tree which moves us to tears; overwhelms us with gratitude and wonder at being out in nature.

After quoting Blake, Easwaran goes on to quote Thomas a Kempis, saying:

“If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.” The pure in spirit, who see God, see him here and now: in his handiwork, his hidden purpose, the wry humor of his creation.

Every creature a book of holy doctrine. Wow. It comes back to being able to look, being able to see things that way, see each other that way. We determine how and what we see in the world. Seeing the tree which moves us, seeing God’s handiwork in nature and people in our lives, is the reminder I take today.

It’s cool to have Blake surface while studying Luke’s Gospel and the Beatitudes. Jesus was calling for people to see and be in new and different ways than what was going on around them. In his art and writing, Blake saw in new ways, broke from tradition, and conveyed the prophetic and the wondrous. He opened my eyes to writing being able to break free from form and constraint.

Since it’s his birthday, let’s walk toward Blake a bit more. He illustrated religious texts; it’s moving quickly into Advent and Christmas; and we have groups who have studied Luke’s take on Jesus’ birth narrative where angels appear to the shepherds. So this struck me today: Blake drew and painted scenes for a John Milton poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Blake illustrates Milton’s words, which describe a scene we know better using Luke’s words:

And suddenly there was with the angel, a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.” (Luke 2:14)

Today, on Blake’s birthday, and every day, whether we need angels to point it out to us, or whether we can use our own eyes, maybe we can see the divine in the everyday, the tree which moves us.

Just Get Living

“Just Keep Livin,” was a notion from David Wooderson, Matthew McConaughey’s character from the movie “Dazed and Confused.” The motto struck McConaughey so much that he named his foundation after it. I have dug it as a way of going about life–you struggle, you fall down, if you are lucky enough to get back up, just keep livin. You have great moments, you celebrate, you drink it in, just keep livin. What else can you do?

But what if you get to a point in life, you come to a crossroads, you have an awakening of some sort, and you look at life differently? What if you wake up to a revelation you can’t go back from? You are compelled to do something. You have to act.

Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. – Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude”

You can know something all you want, right down into your very being, but unless you act on it, act in accordance with it, unless it means enough to live it, what do you really have?

Thought and life, thought and action, need to be aligned. They need to have each other’s back, to prove one another. It can be a feedback loop:

Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. – Merton

I would venture to say, if you live in an area where you grew up, and you love life, you are tapping into something like experiencing new things in the old and old in the new. Coming at something familiar with fresh eyes is huge for me.

Let’s get back to action. We are a society whose actions don’t line up with our words. We see it in churches, politics, sports, schools, you name it. We are all guilty of it to some extent. But we can do something about it in our own lives.

I’ve been pretty good at thinking elevated thoughts, finding and mining great experiences outside, or as a father; having moments, minor epiphanies that leave me reeling; riding that stoke, maybe writing it down, on to the next. Surely they are moments to be savored, to carry with us, to seek out.

Then I come to a place in life, where things look different. Things feel different. Life the way it was falls apart, shakes to pieces. And a new life is opened up–opened up and connected, or uncovered to be part of something bigger. Like I’ve been given the gift of a new way of seeing and being. If I do nothing with that, if I put it on a shelf to come back to later, or I just keep living the same way, and sit on it, then what do I know differently? What have I done with the gift?

The spiritual life if first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. – Merton

When you know things to be different than they were, it is no longer okay to just keep living. It’s more a matter to just get living.

There’s a funny thing about an awakening where God is concerned. That kind of awakening is not a matter of: go to church, be good, color inside the lines and everything will be okay. Anybody can do that and churches are full of people who like that safe approach to spirituality: follow the rules, keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times. It’s comfortable, reassuring.

Look back at the lives that the early prophets lived, the life that Jesus lived, the lives the disciples lived. Did they play it safe? Not so much.

The prophets, too, were a wild bunch. They had to be because they were the spokespeople of a wild God, a God who didn’t care much about temples and offerings but who cared a lot about the way people were treated and the opening of the human heart. – Richard Rohr, “From Wild Man to Wise Man”

In my mind, any kind of spiritual life is not about playing it safe, but following, being led by the spirit, or more specifically, the Holy Spirit working through us. The opening of the human heart. And that can be some scary stuff. But it’s when and where the adventure begins. It’s where it gets good. It’s open eyes, new eyes, wide eyes, looking down a path, taking it all in, and walking it to see where it goes.

Hold on, what’s different? I’ve walked paths, walked and run trails for years? What’s new? The difference is a new understanding: it’s not about me, or my walk specifically. I’m not just randomly picking paths. I’m trying to go where I am led, called, and trust it, trust God. I’m not setting out down a path I would have chosen or thought about prior to now. I’m trying to act on thoughts that I don’t exactly know how they came to me.

Wisdom is God Himself, living in us, revealing Himself to us only in so far as we live it. – Merton

I’m trying to wise up. And just get living.